What Famous Trilogy Will Best Explain Cavs-Warriors III?

The Cleveland Cavaliers and the Golden State Warriors are meeting for an unprecedented third straight NBA Finals. With no history to look to for reference, we sought insight on how the series might turn out from the next best thing: The Return of the King, The Godfather III, and more.

The Golden State Warriors and the Cleveland Cavaliers have gone and pulled off the first NBA Finals trilogy in the history of this world and probably every other world. All that the kismet curmudgeons and super-team grumblers have feared from the very beginning has come to pass. Both the Cavs and the Warriors leisurely strolled into the Big Hardwood Dance, and with the exception of one game against the Boston Celtics and a single half against superstar android Kawhi Leonard, they made it look about as difficult as making a 3-1 joke on the internet.

So now the stage is set for an unprecedented tie-breaking bout. The Cavaliers have the momentum. The Warriors have the artillery. We’re in uncharted sea monster-infested waters now, and even as this is the first NBA trilogy in recorded history, it’s certainly not the first trilogy. How will it all play out? You can keep your musty tomes of stats and your deep dives into advanced analytics. A far more accurate method to predict what is to come is to look back to other iconic third installments for clues.

The Return of the King: Extended Edition (2003)

This is the epic conclusion between the dark forces of Oracle and the idyllic Midwestern concrete of the Land. In this scenario we’ll get the full seven games, including multiple double overtimes. The series will periodically be exhilarating, but mostly it’ll be a sloggy war of attrition. Expect more or less pointless cavalcades of Hack-a-Iguodala and Hack-a-Tristan late in games. As LeBron is awarded his ring, it’s possible David West, supremely lustful of that championship jewelry, to bite his finger off and fall into a tech-volcano.

Cavaliers in 7.
(P.S. To the guy in the comments who just has to mention that The Lord of the Rings was not a trilogy at all but a single work divided into three parts...okay. Thank you. Punk is not dead, thanks to you.)

Back to the Future Part III (1990)

If this Finals follows the schematic of the final Back to the Future film, then it may well be a letdown, though certain contrarians may insist it was the best of the three. They’d be wrong, but that’s fine. People are allowed to be wrong. Future historians will still wonder why the hell with all the new and exciting turns this trilogy could have taken, did both Golden State and Cleveland insist on dressing up like cowboys for this comfortable Warriors-in-five victory?

Lodger by David Bowie (1979)

Mirroring the final effort of Bowie’s Berlin Trilogy, this match-up provides us with an extremely solid series of just good basketball, absent melodrama and stirring historic collapses, but plentiful in deep cut favorites such as “the Patrick McCaw game” and “Kevin Love stealing a hot dog from a small child in Oracle” and “the other chase down block that was pretty good, not quite as good as the last one, but pretty good nonetheless.” Everyone who matters plays pretty well (especially Ian Clark and Deron Williams!) and the final scores are relatively close, albeit never really in question. No overtimes. A very accessible, if not seminal series.

Warriors in 6.

Locked Room from the New York Trilogy (1986) by Paul Auster

Eschewing the epistemological predicaments and the relentless deconstruction of what honor and valor and human will might possibly mean in the context of running around on a basketball court that dominated the first two meetings between these teams, this series looks to take itself a bit less seriously. It will still play out as a post-modern jigsaw puzzle, but we’re all a little older now, a little tired of the wars, and surely, as Draymond urges us, we should appreciate greatness, and immediately cease trying to dissect matters of justification, belief, and truth as it pertains to testicles getting smashed during a game.

Warriors in 6.

Third Punic War (149-146 B.C.E.)

This one takes on the shape of by far the most depressing and one-sided of the Punic Wars between the Carthaginian Empire and the Roman Republic. Klay Thompson begins and ends every pre-game press conference with “Cleveland delenda est, fam.” The Warriors, a loaded superteam created by the computer chip oligarchs, steamroll the scrappy but out of their depth Cavaliers. The Warriors then destroy Cleveland and sell 50,000 citizens of Cuyahoga County into slavery. A bit harsh, but they don’t want to turn the trilogy into a tetralogy. Three times in a row is all in good fun, but four times is just silly.

Warriors in 4.

Army of Darkness (1992)

This series proves to be a cult favorite behind JR Smith discovering that there’s nothing in the rule book that explicitly forbids you from replacing your possessed hand with a chainsaw and going back to a low-budget looking medieval kingdom for some reason.

Cavaliers in 2.

The Godfather Part III (1990)

Everyone’s least favorite Finals, chiefly because newcomer Kevin Durant (Sofia Coppola) gives a wooden performance and never quite blends into the established ensemble cast, forcing the issue time and time again leading to various critical miscues in the midst of monumental moments.

Cavaliers in 6, but it’s not fun.

Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins (2010)

Never read it, never saw it. Willing to go out on the proverbial limb that the series will come down to whichever squad more adroitly combines dystopia with ennui. Who is the biggest Hunger Games fan on either roster? Probably Andre Iguodala.

Warriors in 4 or Cavaliers in 7.

The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

Christopher Nolan’s final Batman film is a likely blueprint for this third match-up between the two teams in the NBA that are just wasting everyone else’s time. Hotly anticipated, sort of anticlimactic, and maybe vaguely fascist? Dashing capitalist aristocrat Steph Curry finally gets his shit together after being owned so thoroughly by Robespierre/Bane/LeBron James and his Jacobin Cavaliers, and with the life-hack of Kevin Durant (Catwoman) and Draymond Green (whoever Joseph Gordon-Levitt was supposed to be...Robin, right?), make short and brutal work of the Rust Belt revolutionaries. The rich disruptors prevail yet again. Joe Lacob gives a rousing speech as the trophy is handed to him, saying, “Greed is good. I’m taking this to bed again. Triggered much, snowflake?”

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